Globalization and the proliferation of information technology enables tasks that were once performed locally within an organization to be performed in other locations and possibly by other organizations. It is often desirable for an organization to have tasks performed in an area where labor is more cost-effective and/or to take advantage of the expertise and/or specialization of another organization. It may also be useful for an organization to focus on its core business and push tasks unrelated to its core business to other organizations.
Outsourcing and, particularly, Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) may be understood to describe a situation where a client organization imposes a specific set of tasks upon a third party. The third party may be a separate or an auxiliary organization. The third party may be located in another country or in a location near the client organization. One example of Business Process Outsourcing is a third party organization providing information technology (IT) services for an automobile and/or a machine tools manufacturer. These IT services might range from supply chain management to the control of manufacturing processes. Some of these IT services might be performed in one country whereas other IT services may be performed in a different country.
An outsourcing environment, particularly a BPO environment may be understood to include objects, processes and circumstances defining how the third party performs tasks for the client organization. The elaboration of a BPO environment may include information system configuration requirements, access control requirements or restrictions imposed for the sake of security. The objects in the BPO environment may include equipment, such as computers with a specific configuration. It may be desirable for a client organization to partially define a BPO environment for the third party in order to mitigate risk and maintain accountability within the client organization. Thus, the third party may be required to operate under restrictions outside its control.
One or more technical restrictions may be imposed on users, user computers and/or server computers in a BPO environment. It may be desirable to constrain the communications of computers in a BPO environment to one Local Area Network (LAN), or to limit the communications of a computer in a BPO environment to an explicitly identified set of computers. Network connectivity in a BPO environment may be limited to users and computers directed to perform a specific set of tasks. It may also be desirable to restrict user access to computers and/or to restrict the interactions allowed between computers.
Prior art messaging solutions may require open TCP/IP ports or the enabling of insecure services on user computers. Other prior art messaging solutions may require software to be installed on each user computer. Prior art solutions may also require system registry changes to be performed on a user computer. Prior art solutions may further require access to the Internet or to other computers outside the third party's network perimeter. These and other requirements may not be possible or desirable for messaging in a BPO environment.